Deconstructing Rage: What went wrong and how to fix it

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Keep the game internally consistent

This is Rage‘s greatest flaw. From the opening mission forward, everyone in game acts as though the player character is the only human being on Earth capable of dealing with the apparent daily problems of post-apocolyptia. The “It’s Up To You“ trope is a veritable staple of the gaming industry (Doom arguably invented it) but the settlers in Rage seem incapable of standing up to a troupe of eight-year-old girl scouts, much less the various real-world dangers that threatened everyone before the player got defrosted.

Rage’s problems in this area run deeper simply relying on a One Man Army, and it hurts the game. At one point, you return to Hagar Settlement after completing a quest, and are told that bandits attacked the camp while you were away. The only sign that this actually occurred is that two NPCs will be in a building they don’t normally occupy. One of them is asleep and snores noticeably. The settlement is otherwise absolutely normal.

Once you reach Wellspring, you’ll periodically hear the town’s mayor lecturing citizens on the importance of cleanliness as a means of avoiding a pandemic. Later, when bandits are attempting to poison the town’s well, you’re sent down into the pumping station to clean them out – when you discover this:

Yep, that’s an entire well filled with corpses. It’s directly below Wellspring and still part of the town’s water pump complex. When you actually reach the room where the Ghosts are trying to inject poison into the water supply, a group of unidentified NPCs randomly shows up and helps you fight. Nothing about either event makes sense — if the guards are from the town, why don’t they identify themselves (and why was the player sent down solo)? Meanwhile, who decided that throwing all the dead people into a well in the middle of the pumping station made good sense?

The game’s first major boss battle requires a rocket launcher — which you literally get from a vending machine. In a hospital. A (temporary) infinite supply of rockets is also included, in case you don’t figure out the incredibly simple boss mechanics within your first few shots.

While exploring the same area, you’ll discover a research lab utterly coated in semi-organic material that makes it resemble the hive from Alien. There’s no reason for the gunk to be there and it serves no purpose.

It’s these sort of design decisions that leave the game feeling half-baked. Toss in the fact that the Authority is as faceless and undefined as its possible for an adversary to be, and the final product falters. The combat is fun — but there are a lot of great FPS games that offer good combat and better single-player campaigns than Rage does.

If id wants to retake its position as a premier development house, it needs to start by acknowledging some of the innovations in gameplay that’ve occurred since the days when Quake II was the pinnacle of storytelling and design. Rage isn’t bad — but it could’ve been great.

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“… playing through the game you can’t help wishing you could learn even a few of the dodges, leaps, or melee attacks your opponents use…”

Maybe the protagonist is just a wimpy fatass who can barely carry his dozen guns and walk around, leave the acrobatics.

Mohamed Al-Nadi

There are a few other points that should be added to this great article:
“Not in order”
1 – Where the hell is this General Cross (The Authority’s boss)? Why wasn’t he shown in the game?
2 – The first boss in the game (In the garage level) – had a life meter; what about the other so-called bosses? Where’s their life meter? huh? Why the inconsistency in the design?
3 – What was so special about our protagonist? They’ve mentioned that all of the Ark individuals posses some certain traits or something? What was his? Being a mute?
4 – Mmmm…. Well that’s it for now. I guess the article has covered most of my remarks already.

Julian Paul

Ok, i’m a bit tired of this ‘open world’ BS now. Not the concept itself but the way these damn games implement it. From far cry 2 to dead island to rage now. It’s just so annoying having to commute in these games. Of course, there’s a fast travel option but you still have to move around a lot. So you can kill a few enemies on the way, but after a few dozen trips, that becomes mindlessly boring. Gimme the closed linear gameplay of a classic like Half life any day over this crap. And what’s with the bug ridden crap releases? Dead island and this one now, both with day one patches, and still work like crap.

darold hassler

I still believe that Rage is a poor rip-off of what Borderlands
did correct. And to think that Borderlands2 will be about twice that size! … Excuse
me; I was drooling all over myself. The “open world” that Borderlands gave us
made me not care that I zipped back and forth a few times. Rage just seemed too
generic, too “been there done that,” too … oh heck, I don’t care anymore! I’m
just upset that id’s beautiful game engine—that we waited YEARS to see—was used
in such a wistful game. I’m so glad I played my friends copy because I would’ve
been pissed if I had to spend $60 for that … made me want to start Borderlands
over from the beginning, for the third time.

I just beat the game and going to start a new game on nightmare difficulty. Overall, it’s a good game, but I can’t help wondering how much of a better game Rage could have been with some rpg elements. I think one of the developers said they wanted to be different and not focus on rpg but focus more on the fps side. I believe if they really wanted to be different, they could have added rpg traits that makes them stand out from other rpg’s.

darold hassler

Yea, Borderlands got me liking the whole FPS/RPG thing. I
recently jumped back into an old Doom3 saved game I had, and enjoyed it though
it was a “hallway” or boxed in FPS. Rage had me expecting just way too much
from it, and I think that was most of the problem.

I thing the game producers need to rethink all game production pipeline. Imagine fallout 3 world and open environment whit ID’s graphic and shooter experience. Like big Hollywood movies on witch the vfx shots are made by many small production houses, i think that is the future of gaming pipelines. The hardware these days is very powerful to sustain big open worlds but the production of such a huge game world and experience is very very hard if not impossible to make by only one studio who is for example experienced whit only one type of game. When the game studios will collaborate each other on a game then we really will see a new era for gaming.

Anonymous

What’s forgotten is that id prefers to create the game engine versus the game itself. While they do release games based on their engine, their games tend to showcase technical aspects and lack the refined and polished experience we have all come to love and expect. Never expect id to release the best game. That will come from one of their license partners.

oh yeah how come the other hub worlds lacked a map but the first one did it was super annoying. and as I said you cant go back and quest after doing the final mission and theres no warning its the final mission and the authority was no one they shouldve just called em combine cuz the last level is half life 2s last level but in that game you fight combine alot of the time not just random bandits then the bad guys are authority robots

and the dialogue all sucked . i really loved rage too but it had alot of issues

Chase

I just played through the game on Nightmare, (I never played any other difficulty) and I thought the combat was incredible, though the story was disappointing and the game incredibly short. So I was wondering if Id Software plans to use Rage’s combat system in any future games. Any help would be much appreciated.

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